Well, isn’t everyone tremendously excited about Splinter Cell: Conviction? There was a bit of fatigue setting in when the game was first announced… six hundred years ago, despite Chaos Theory still being well loved. Ubisoft had two factories making it at once, trying to produce one a year, and it didn’t bode well. Then it went quiet and they seemed to have the idea of spending ages on it, to make it really good. Well, it’s looking that way. There’s a new trailer fresh from Comic Con, in which you can enjoy the head-smashing, wall-crashing brutality of a Very Angry Man who wants his missing daughter back.

It’s good to see Sam lost that “urban cool” look with the messanger bag and hip-emo hairstyle he had when this was first announced. The objectives printed on random bits of scenery thing is interesting, but based on the tailer this looks and feels like all the other Splinter Cell game.

It still astonishes me how bad the 360 can make things look. Badly lit, awful texturing and in need of a whole boat-load of anti-aliasing, this just looks terrible. I suppose there is a chance this will look better on PC, but given Ubisoft’s recent efforts I doubt it.

And that’s before we get into the whole “this looks sod all like Splinter Cell” argument.

Also this vid is just a mash up of things we have seen before leading me to suspect that there is not a great deal of variation in the game or that it is very “interactive cutscene” and QTE heavy.

Sigh…time to reinstall Chaos Theory and raise a toast to it as the last installation in a good franchise…

His daughter’s not been kidnapped, she’s been killed. This is a pure revenge story.

Looks good to me. Older Splinter Cells were too much like hard work, all effort and no fun. A switch to playing a Bourne-like hero could be just what the series needs, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of stealthing to do still, it’s just that they’re choosing to focus the marketing on the new gameplay style.

Isn’t ‘old special forces guy has daughter troubles the plot of Taken? If this manages to be half as good as Taken I’ll speak like Liam Neeson for a day, which is twice the promise it could be because I’m a girl. I’ll do the voice and everything, just like I did when I stopped playing fallout 3 but I still wanted his reassuring warm voice guiding me. I’ve said too much.

@Paul_M: are you sure you know what “evolution” means ? sequels are supposed to “grow” and “improve” existing features and maybe “add” new ones, throwing the old games in the trash and making a completely different thing and reusing only the name of the game and the characters is not evolution, if they want to make a different game then make a NEW franchise

Don’t know where the Bourne comparisons are coming from. The original intention for the game was that it would be Bourne like, i.e about running away, diverting attention, etc. This obviously seemed like hard work to successfully program, so instead they decided to drop the interesting original idea and just make fairly straight forward action game. Maybe good fun, but I’m not expecting the unique experience that this game once looked like it may give before its face lift.

Really looking forward to this, even if the stealth has been replaced with action for the most part, but I like action games so fair is fair :)

Only ever played the first one all the way through, not touched 2 or 3 and picked up the PC version of 4 on steam, but that seemed odd, like people tell you to do stuff and I have no reason why or how to do it at all, and the story so far is absurd, he was on some random mission and OH GOD HIS DAUGTHER IS DEAD. Ok… umm… anything else? No…ok.

Is it worth just cutting my losses with this version and trying the alternative Xbox 1 version?

I want to do the torture part to the devs at Ubisoft, but instead of “who killed my daughter” it would be “WHY DID YOU REMOVE SPY. VS MERC, WHAT KIND OF IDIOT WOULD TAKE OUT THE MOST MEMORABLE, MOST PROFITABLE, BEST ASPECT OF THE GAME AND REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING SO CRAPPY THAT YOU’VE ALIENATED EVERY SPLINTER CELL FAN EVER”.

Unless Ubisoft puts the traditional Pandora Tomorrow/Chaos Theory Spy vs. Merc multiplayer mode in any future Splinter Cell title, I will never buy it, and plenty of other Splinter Cell fans never will either.

Ubisoft is a lesson for any developer. Find what you are good at and stick with it. It’s the same thing (but on a much lesser level of sentimentality) as removing Blood Gulch from Halo 3. What the heck?

After Double Agent, I have lost all respect for Ubisoft. They ruined one of the best aspects of Splinter Cell, tried to force the “we know what you like better than you do” mode down our throats, and told us to screw off when we said we wanted Spy vs. Merc back.

And I’ll say it gain, this doesn’t look like a stealth game. Some people don’t want to play third person action games! I don’t know what it is about game developers now a days but they seem to be off on there ability to make non-action games.

I never had played any SC before Double Agent and really liked it. I thought it was a very very cool game. Then I played Chaos Theory and liked that too.

The multi in DA was pure condensed ass, though. Never played it in CT.

Anyway, I’m not too excited about this. I’m gonna skip it. A bunch of the new features (like auto actions by “tagging”) are clearly designed to make the game simpler and more obvious to play, and I liked the “realistic”, observation based mechanics of DA/CT. I was kind of psyched about Conviction when they first announced it, though, because the Fugitive-style in realistic locations seemed like the next logical step after DA.

@JKjoker – Well, I’ve just checked and yes, I do know what evolution means. Thank you.

The extent to which you claim SCC has done any of those things is really yet to be seen. It’s hardly “completely different”. Impotent net rage aside, there’s really nothing you can do about it anyway apart from vote with your wallet and then you may well be simply denying yourself the pleasure of a good, albeit, evolved game. You might as well be positive and find things you do like about it.

I’m not in favour of cynical franchise clinging but I don’t really think you can accuse ubi of that in this case.

@Paul_M: again with “evolved” stop using that word, im not saying SCC will be a bad game or anything but if they plan to remove key features from the old games then its not splinter cell, just dont call it a sequel

and about “franchise clinging” as you call it, yeah, well, it seems like franchise fans would like the franchise to continue with what the franchise did best and they liked about it, is it such a difficult concept to grasp ?

and about “franchise clinging” as you call it, yeah, well, it seems like franchise fans would like the franchise to continue with what the franchise did best and they liked about it, is it such a difficult concept to grasp ?

Looks pretty sweet. Probably still won’t get it though, I’ve never been a huge fan of 3rd person shooters. It always seems a better vehicle for sneak games, like Hitman and the original Splinter Cell games. I won’t completely sign off on it yet, the whole pissed off agent thing is always an interesting story to me. Bourne, Taken, etc.

I agree with the sentiment that Chaos Theory was excellent!
This looks quite different, but the gameplay videos I’ve seen paints a promising picture. It looks very cool and fun. There’s definitively a lot more murdering than in the previous games, though.

@tmp: yeah i remember that one but its now outdated, its missing a few panels when Mr. Potatamoto finds out casual gamers get bored faster and dont spend as much money in games and tries to win their old fans back (last E3 ?)

Just to clarify, Sam’s daughter was killed in at the beginning of Double Agent. I realize almost nobody bothered to play DA to the end of the first level and thus cannot be expected to know this, but that’s how it happened.

It’s an insult to the Splinter Cell series that they’ve deviated this much from the original character… at the same time it’s insulting to even dream of comparing this game to Max Payne.

I may not like the new Max Payne 3 character either and I could probably agree both characters seem to have switched places, but the game Splinter Cell Conviction will be is a universe away from the thriller action shooter Max Payne is.